Single Review: “Xerces Blue” by Rachael Lawson
Image Courtesy: Joel Sartore
A hundred years ago, scattered among the dunes of the Sunset District in the San Francisco Peninsula, you might have found an abundance of watercolor azures—a fluttering of outlined wings delicate and fragmented like stained glass. The Xerces Blue, a species of butterfly once native to California, fell completely extinct in the early 1940s after urban development, specifically parking lots, eradicated its habitat. Today, the Xerces Blue is only visible behind glass exhibit windows and scientific collections, the final remainders of its legacy forever frozen in the now-distant past. Its forgotten story is a haunting reminder of the effects on a natural world dominated by human intervention, much like the sad irony of reducing trees to museums and paving paradise for parking lots in Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”
Rachael Lawson’s latest single, “Xerces Blue,” offers a gentle and resonant ode to the now-gone Californian butterfly in a way that examines human desire and the frail delineation between ephemerality and extinction. Lawson is both a music student at Florida State University and a self-produced indie artist whose first E.P., Nowhere, USA, was released in early 2023. She wrote “Xerces Blue” as part of a larger examination of the ways that people physically and digitally interact with and alter their environments. The single serves as the eighth track on her first full solo album, Pure Honey, which further explores ideas of nature, technology, and human relationships.
Image Courtesy: @rachaelflute
“Xerces Blue” begins with a muted crackle and light, echoey strumming of a ukulele, transporting us into a paradox. Throughout the song, Lawson elucidates the fraught impossibility of preservation and how creation can lead to ruin when devastation is hidden beneath the beautiful. The song’s refrain, “I’m more than sad, I’m Xerces Blue,” emphasizes the relationship between human destruction and human emotion.
The single itself serves as a meta-curation when it comes to the memory of the Xerces Blue, the heavenly tranquility of the song’s sound piecing together artistic tragedies like that of Vincent Van Gogh, and the ghostly remnants of Charles Ives’ musicianship. It allows us to wonder through its speculative lyrics and soft vocals—what part of the beautiful gets left behind when everything else is destroyed?
Image Courtesy: @rachaelflute
As Lawson sings, she alludes to phenomena of nature and compares human desires to storms and dissolved memories as lost to the wind. In doing so, she highlights the commonalities between humans and the environment in a way that embraces the transience of our existence. Toward the refrain’s final iteration, the choral vocals provide a near-angelic backdrop, perhaps a way of saying goodbye and providing the hopeful implication of something better. As Lawson asks, “When was the last time you truly felt free,” or “took time to exist, to just simply be?”
“Xerces Blue” proposes that maybe there is something beautiful after all of this loss, that maybe destruction is not the only ending.
You can listen to “Xerces Blue” here on Spotify.
Strike Out,
Writer: Emily Clemente
Editor: Lindsey Limbach
Tallahassee